Journey to Freedom

By Sergei Ovsiannikov, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Whilst serving in the Soviet army in 1973, Sergei Ovsiannikov was arrested and imprisoned for acts of disobedience under military command. It was while in prison, like Solzhenitsyn and Dostoevsky, that he began to ponder deeper issues and on release trained to be a Russian orthodox priest.

This extraordinary but short book is about his search for true freedom. The issues he wrestles with are profound and, like any confrontation with truth, it caused him great anguish and pain. As Ovsiannikov wrote:

'It was in my prison cell that I lost fear. I realised that if they sent me to a labour camp with a long sentence, it did not matter because I was free. Of course subsequently I came to realise that freedom is not given, you have to take responsibility for it.'

It was during this time that he discovered Christianity and decided that this was the real meaning of his life.

Later, after a period spent with the Russian Orthodox community in London, Ovsiannikov lived for the last twenty years of his life in Amsterdam in charge of the Russian Orthodox community.

Drawing heavily on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin and translated from the original Russian by celebrated translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky with an introduction by Rowan Williams, this brief spiritual book is a small masterpiece of its kind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Feb 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781472983916

Sergei Ovsiannikov

Sergei Ovsiannikov was a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church. He lived for a number of years in London where he was a member of the Russian orthodox community and subsequently in Amsterdam where he continued to serve as a priest. He died in 2018.

Book preview

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To leave legalism,

To arrive at love.

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Contents

Foreword by Dr Rowan Williams

From the Author

Instead of a preface

Part One Lost Freedom

1 How Man Was Left Without Freedom

What Sort of Freedom Are We Talking About?

Where Do People Get Their Freedom, or, Where Did I Come From?

The Ice Age, or, How Did Fear Come into Being?

2 Freedom, Fear and Slavery

Fear of the Dark and of the Light

Unfreedom in the Egyptian Desert

What to Do with Slaves’ Blood?

Part Two Finding Yourself

3 What is Being Yourself?

The Story of a Real Man

Who Are You?

Homo ludens: Pumpkins and Roles

The Tragedy of ‘The Sandman’

Am I Living My Own Life?

St Ephrem the Syrian: ‘Enter into Yourself’

St Basil the Great: ‘Hearken to Yourself’

‘I’ and ‘Mine’

Where Did Abraham Go?

Desires, Manifest and Secret

4 Sick Soul and Healthy Soul

On Joy

The Dried-up Soul

Why Must We Lose Our Soul?

How to Step into the Light

5 On the New Man

How to Understand the Apostle Paul

Of Outward and Inward

‘I Went Away from the Law’ (But Not Too Far) or, On Gratitude

6 If You Prefer ­Unfreedom, Come Here, or, About ­Passions Simply Explained

The Small Joys of a Communal Flat

The Way Through the Labyrinth

Freedom to Move Your Arms and Marijuana

Asceticism Is Simple

Let Us Reach the Dead End

Bodily Passions and ‘Skewed’ Standards

Sand, Soot, and Running in Circles

Passions as Ur-Elements

Part Three Through the Prism of Freedom

7 Freedom and Politics, or, Does Revolution Equal ­Freedom?

Paradise and Democracy

From the City of Kitezh to Amsterdam

East and West

‘Revolution, You Taught Us’

8 Religion and Tradition – the End of Freedom?

Organism and Organization

Confession According to Freud

Saintliness from the Viewpoint of Freedom

9 Love

Love – and Do as You Like

The Confession of Gravitation: Sexuality

Freedom and Family Life

10 Fear

We Have Nothing to Fear Except Fear Itself

Why Is God’s Judgement Terrible?

Fear of the Lord and Philosophical Fear

Part Four Coming Out into Liberty

11 From Space to Time

Symbol or Reality?

What Time Are We Living In?

12 Creativity as the Method for Coming Home

And if ‘God is Dead’?

The Free Act of Extracting Meaning

13 The Gospel: Come Out into Liberty!

Peace and Liberty

The Encounter: Enough Waiting!

    Epilogue: The Work Is Only Beginning

Foreword

The sobering experience of Spring 2020, as the whole world seemed to be going into lockdown, raised for many people the question of who it is that’s left when the usual means of self-reassurance have vanished. Who are we when most of the things (and persons) we use to tell ourselves who we are disappear? This book begins with a nightmarishly extreme version of this, the experience of solitary confinement in a Soviet military prison: and the author sets out, with a near-clinical precision, how he came to see that in such circumstances what is left of us is simply fear – unless we have some contact not with our habitual, self-directed protections and props, but with authentic freedom.

This polarity between fear and freedom runs through the whole book. Fr Sergei explores what it means to grasp freedom not as an empty liberty of choice but as a fundamental setting-free by discovering ourselves anchored in a truth that does not depend on us, on our resources, our wills, our supposed needs; for him, the experience of this liberation is at some level already the experience of God even if we do not know how to name God. It is the assurance that we do not have to create ourselves and maintain ourselves in being because we belong with and to a love that will not abandon and does not change. And the irony is that we live more and more deeply into this freedom as we learn how to adjust our scratchy and restless egos to an encompassing reality – by diagnosing the workings of our ‘passions’ (our unexamined instinctual life, by no means evil in itself but stifling if we refuse to look at it and make sense of it), by finding who and what we can trustfully and freely ‘obey’, who and what we can trust to make us more alive. The rhythms of ‘asceticism’ and the patterns of common life and worship in Christ’s Body are not alien impositions but ways of growing in our humanity – so that (in one of the pervasive images of the book, drawn from a saying of Chekhov) the blood that runs in our veins will be human blood, not slaves’ blood.

In the light of this, we can learn how to value things that otherwise seem to disturb and menace us. We can learn patient and practical listening to one another, individually and in society; we can learn to live with deeper silences, knowing that our human creativity arises not from the chaotic noise of self-expression as we usually imagine it but from the quiet in which we know that we do not need to be in control, do not need to be marketing, cultivating, refining and defending our eager, greedy will.

This book could hardly be more timely as we begin to think what kind of human society we want to nurture on the far side of the trauma we have shared – the traumatic shock of knowing how vulnerable we are as human family, and the shock too of facing the challenge of what to do with our fear. It is a book which offers – unobtrusively – a whole vision of the reality we inhabit; a book of ethics, spirituality and philosophy. And all this because it is essentially a book about God: the God who alone can speak into our fear and promise that we can in spite of all be turned inside out by the divine gift and by the gratitude, patience, joy, silence that grow out of it.

Rowan Williams

April 2020

From the Author

Whatever we do – make great discoveries or commit thoughtless acts, work on our career, fall in love, create or suffer – an honest look at our whole human life, and even the whole of human history, reveals that one of its chief leitmotifs is the search for freedom. People constantly strive for freedom and endlessly suffer from its absence. This yearning concerns all the spheres of life, from art and politics to physiology and everyday existence. The word ‘freedom’ is one of the most important human words.

Where in our nature does this come from? And, above all – how to become free?

In this book we will make an attempt – probably weak and insufficient – to reach an understanding of our freedom.

I am an Orthodox priest and have lived and served in Amsterdam for almost thirty years. One of our parish readers (an American by birth) says: ‘Whatever Father Sergei talks about, it always turns out to be about freedom …’

That is probably why, when a publisher asked me to write a book about freedom, I decided to accept. I decided to walk down this path together with my readers.

However, do not expect any magic moment from this book: to come to the next turning and there find the ‘know-how’. For good or ill, this book is not a collection of maths problems with the right answers at the end. At least, not answers in the form in which we would like to find them and apply them to our life as a method that helps us to become free.

The problem is that ‘unfreedom’ cannot be localized in a specific place of the soul or body and then removed from that place. Unfreedom is all too widely dispersed throughout our life.

In Christianity, life is understood as a path, not as a textbook of moral problems. And everyone for whom it is destined should follow that path.

This book has been conceived as an introduction to freedom. Introduction, not in the sense of a preface followed by the main text, but as intro-duction – walking part of this path together with you, my reader. What is needed for this path? Honesty with yourself, and the wish to ask questions. And you yourself. If you are there, come out into freedom!

Instead of a preface:

About my unfreedom, or, from the observations of a prisoner

I had a special occasion to learn about freedom. A stroke of luck. I was sent to prison. It was during my army service, at the very beginning of the 1970s, on obviously far-fetched grounds – ‘propaganda for the American way of life’ and ‘disobedience to superiors’. I knew almost nothing about the American way of life, while ‘disobedience’ was indeed a widespread phenomenon. In fact, the reason on such occasions was not important. What was important was the result.

The result was what my army superiors needed: they figured that I would return to the ranks as ‘a normal Soviet soldier’ – for instance, I would stop discussing unsuitable questions with other soldiers.

However, it was precisely in prison that freedom came to me. Or, more exactly, that I was born into freedom. Contrary to all logic, contrary to the obviousness of fear. Fear is the main thing that comes over you in prison, in the condition of unfreedom. But it turns out that if you take a good hard look at fear, it does not like the feeling. Fear wants to get away. And then it leaves behind a territory in which freedom may be born.

The main thing in prison is the smell. More than a decade has gone by since I spent the weeks and months allotted to me there, but I remember the smell very well … The smell of a Soviet prison resembles the smell of damp basements, rotten potatoes and human waste. That was in fact the purpose of prison: to turn a man into waste.

Since a state is not a living thing, but only a system, a structure, human freedom will hinder it. It is difficult to live with a free person – no one knows what he will pull off. But if, instead of a human being, there is something obedient and manageable, responding correctly to any order, there you have ‘a worthy member of society’. That is what the manageable ones were called in the 1970s. And the method for making a human being manageable was simple: instil fear in him.

Ideally, fear should pervade the whole human being, penetrate his flesh and blood, become an inalienable shadow, which will not follow behind, as it is supposed to do, but run ahead like a little dog, sniffing all the corners, expecting someone to leap out. This was a fear that expected the unavoidable ‘somebody’.

To cultivate fear in me, they first put me in a common cell. During the day we were taken out to work. The greatest luck was when the assignment lasted the whole day, and we didn’t have to go back to prison for lunch, to consume swill out of an aluminium bowl. How good it was to eat at the construction site or in the kindergarten, where we sawed wood. The farina cooked for the children, which I detested so much when I was little – what happiness it was for a convict!

And so, being in this magical place, I began to observe there how the fears that tormented the ordinary civilian population materialized.

To each of our groups with a work assignment, an armed guard was attached, who obediently followed us. ‘A step to the right, a step to the left, a leap in place are all regarded as escape, and I open fire to kill,’ he informed us each morning. ‘Agreed!’ we replied cheerfully.

But, looking at the actual armed guard, I discovered that outside of prison, ‘in freedom’, each ‘worthy member of society’ had his own ‘armed guard’ – invisible and bodiless. The magic of this place was that the materialized and visible guard was not as frightening as his invisible brother present among the civilian populace. Invisible, he controlled not only all movements, but also all thoughts; he sat inside the head of every well-behaved citizen, who thus became his own guard. It was precisely in prison that I realized that the ‘thought police’, of whom I had known so little, work most intensely outside the prison walls. It was an interesting discovery: people ‘in freedom’ are subject to more rigid self-control and live in greater fear than convicts.

I shared my questions about freedom and my thoughts about the invisible guards with my cellmates. One of them shared my observations with the prison superiors. I was transferred to a solitary cell on the third floor.

That did not upset me. I had long wanted to be by myself; it seemed to me that, being alone, I would not have to hurry anywhere and would finally be able to be myself. Here you are in the desert – alone! I was finally in a place where I could be myself. A dream come true.

The ideal of being in the desert disappeared all too quickly. It turned out that here I really was alone. What can one do alone? On the first day it already became clear that there was practically nothing to do. Sleep was impossible. You could not lie on a damp cement floor for very long, and the guards also peeked through the peephole every once in a while. If they saw me, they would kick me to my feet.

Reading was impossible. There was nothing to read. Writing was impossible. There was nothing to write with and nothing to write on – paper was not provided. What could I do? I could think. Freedom – think as much as you like, the time is all yours! Then it turned out that I did not know how to think. How does one think? If you try thinking about physics (that was my speciality ‘in freedom’ at the time), without the necessary books and collaborators this focus of thought disappears almost instantly. If you think without any focus, nonsense creeps into your head at once. Even a great deal of nonsense. But that was not at all what I wanted to bring to light, and still less was it what I called ‘thinking’.

It sometimes seems to us quite naïvely that to do nothing means to have a long-awaited vacation: classes are cancelled, there is no homework, at last you can rest! But if you cannot read, cannot write, cannot move straight on but only take three short steps from corner to corner, cannot talk, cannot sing songs, it is not a vacation …

Then various mental suggestions begin to come to you. For instance: how about smashing your head against the wall? I had heard such a story on a tour of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, about the Decembrist Bulatov, who was arrested after the failure of the uprising and put in solitary confinement. He made a run and smashed his head against the wall. Soon afterwards he died.

I estimated the distance from wall to wall in my cell. Three steps. Impossible to make a run. Most likely I would only manage to injure myself. But the prospect of exchanging the cell for the prison hospital said nothing about freedom. There was no chance of freedom.

Fear does not necessarily burst into our life like a violent storm, tearing the roof off. There, in prison, fear began to steal up on me slowly. Slowly, slowly, as if on tiptoe, as if in soft slippers, in fur-lined shoes. In Mandelstam there are these lines:

… the fur-shod shadow cannot be heard,

In life’s dark forest fear cannot be overcome.

That is an exact description of what was happening to me then.

In fact, the first impression could not yet be called fear. It was as if a grey shadow moved across the wall, or some useless, superfluous feeling appeared; not even a feeling, but a taste in my mouth. It was not verbal, but rather a feeling or presentiment somewhere in my stomach: something is looming up that you cannot deal with. You lack the bold strength. You’ll break.

There is a special reason for this, which I must speak about. In ordinary circumstances, man has to run all the time. He runs and runs. He has so many cares and worries